This year’s line up included local acts Dubmarine and Chocolate Strings (both bands always manage to put up a great show). Dan Sultan was particularly animated on stage and a definite favourite with the female punters who enjoyed watching him move as much as they enjoyed listening to him.

Dan Sultan

Chocolate Strings

Comedians Shake-A-Speare, Kevin Kropinyeri and Sean Choolburra made the Dingo Shed rock with laughter, while Mark Sheppard continuously cracked up both young and old in the Black Dramatics venue with his “Chasing The Lollyman”.

It has almost become a tradition now for musicians to jam together on the last night of the festival. They are then joined by both traditional and contemporary dancers and makes for quite a show which is not to be missed.

All in all, another great festival, and I’m already looking forward to being back there next year. A big warm thank you to all who performed, danced and organised the event.

An Apple store employee advised me that he considered there to be little noticeable difference between the two versions. I came to a very different conclusion having compared them side by side in store for nearly an hour.

While the menus probably would have been alright, a lot of text is already hard to read due to small font sizes used on many websites. As I didn’t feel like constantly squinting or getting rather close to the screen to read articles on these websites (interestingly enough, the Apple online store was one of the websites I found really hard to read) I opted for a regular screen instead.

So, if you need the extra real estate, by all means, knock yourself out with a 15″ hi-res screen. Otherwise, think very carefully about getting this. If at all possible try before you buy.

Wanting to make a near complete switch from desktop to laptop for all of my work, I decided to wait for the faster and relatively cheaper machines to come out.

After buying and swapping a new hard drive, my machine now is a 15″ 2.66 Ghz i7/8gb RAM/7200 rpm (16mb cache) beauty that deals with virtualisation just fine while running every other application that I throw at it.

Well, without hardly any effort at all, you can tell your browser to stop being automatically redirected to your local Google site:

1. Open your browser
2. Clear your cookies in your browser
3. Allow your browser to accept cookies
4. Navigate to: www.google.com/ncr
5. You should now be able to use any Google site you please

Suppose you have set up a virtual host for a site called sample.dev. This virtual host allows you to use URLs such as http://sample.dev/about-us/our-team.html

Now you want to be able to use that same virtual host in your virtualised environment (=guest environment). You’re just a few simple steps away from making this work for you.

1. Unique Loopback Address

   To make all this a little easier, I prefer to use a different loopback address than the standard 127.0.0.1. My preferred address is: 10.0.0.101. I’ll explain why I use this address later on.

2. Hosts file: Mac

   Ensure your sample.dev site is configured in your local hosts using the 10.0.0.101 address file as follows:

   
10.0.0.101 sample.dev
10.0.0.101 another-site.dev
10.0.0.101 yet-another-site.dev


   We’ll use the local IP address to bridge the guest and host environments. Please note that you can use any local IP address available to you (ie, not yet in use or assigned).

3. Host file: Windows

   Next, we’ll add the same lines to the host file of the guest environment: locate the file (windows/system32/drivers/etc on XP) and duplicate the Mac host file entries:

   
10.0.0.101 sample.dev
10.0.0.101 another-site.dev
10.0.0.101 yet-another-site.dev


4. Applying the Glue

   Now that we have configured the host(s) files on both the guest and host environments all we have left to do is create the actual bridge for these environments. We do this by adding an ifconfig directive to our system by using launchd or rc.local

   • launchd

     Introduced in OS X 10.4, launchd is a flexible way to start/stop/edit processes. To put it to our use, we’d create a plist entry in /Library/LaunchDemons/

     We do this by opening a terminal window and typing:

     sudo touch /Library/LaunchDemons/ifconfig.plist

     Next, open the file we just created in a text editor and add the following:

     <plist version="1.0">
         <dict>
             <key>Label</key>
                 <string>ifconfig</string>
             <key>ProgramArguments</key>
             <array>
                 <string>/sbin/ifconfig</string>
                 <string>lo0</string>
                 <string>alias</string>
                 <string>10.0.0.101</string>
                 <string>netmask</string>
                 <string>255.255.255.0</string>
             </array>
             <key>RunAtLoad</key>
             <true/>
         </dict>
     </plist>
     

     Finally, save and close the file.

   • rc.local

     The rc.local file runs in the background at system start up. While deprecated and essentially replaced in Leopard by the more flexible launchd, it still can be used to launch processes.

     rc.local can be found at /etc/rc.local. If you’re running a more recent system installation, chances are that you’ll have to create this file as OS X has not created this file by default since version 10.4.

     You can create the file by typing the following in your terminal window:

     sudo touch /etc/rc.local

     Now, open the file we just created in a text editor and add the following:

     ifconfig lo0 inet 10.0.0.101 netmask 255.255.255.0 alias

5. Almost done

   You may need to reboot both the hosted and the hosting environment in order to have these changes come into effect.

   Thanks to Rob Sanheim for his tips on the subject.

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain, a non profit organisation at Duke Law School, has made available a worthwhile read in the form of a comic. It examines the legal & ethical boundaries of copyright and intellectual property versus public domain, and the impact that these boundaries have on our society. How far should we go in protecting property? When should people be allowed to use material for their creative pursuits?

The public domain is the realm of material—ideas, images, sounds, discoveries, facts, texts—that is unprotected by intellectual property rights and free for all to use or build upon. Our economy, culture and technology depend on a delicate balance between that which is, and is not, protected by exclusive intellectual property rights. Both the incentives provided by intellectual property and the freedom provided by the public domain are crucial to the balance. But most contemporary attention has gone to the realm of the protected.

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain

So, if this issue is of concern to you, make sure you check out the comic.

And no, I am not being “unfairly discriminatory” here: anybody who knows how to read a log file and do a little digging can find out where script kiddie attacks are coming from (I’m not talking about “real” hackers here—the kind that know how to conceal their activity by rerouting their page requests).

So from now on, anyone in China or the Russian Federation trying to directly access this site is now being blocked. Sorry folks, but enough is enough.

I got my IP range for China at www.okean.com and for the Russian Federation at www.countryipblocks.net. The downside is that it increases my .htaccess file to a whopping 150kb—which is a shame as this file is read by Apache with every request to the server.

Meet Moe

One of the reasons could be that on large scale enterprise networks it takes a lot of effort, skill and funds to update the contents of a Managed Operating Environment (MOE). For me, this would be a prime reason to drop IE altogether in favour of a browser that does not tie into the heart of the OS the way Internet Explorer does. I dare say potential security issues would be much easier to deal with if users are not exposing the core of their OS by surfing with a browser that is entirely integrated. It certainly would facilitate updating the browser more frequently.

So, while I understand that MOE updates are difficult to roll out, system administrators (and especially the CEOs who manage the sys admins) should understand that keeping IE6 alive makes web development more cumbersome and therefore, more expensive. I am still working on intranet/extranet/public sites that are designed for IE6. It is a costly process which also holds back web development in general.

Dinosaur

And let’s face it, IE6 is a dinosaur these days: it was initially released on August 27, 2001. Which makes it, at the time of this post, nearly 8 years old. I shall repeat that: nearly 8 years old. To put that into perspective: while early history of the web can be traced back to the 1980s, initial mainstream adoption of the web (outside of university labs) did not take place until around 1993. That is 16 years ago. By that calculation, IE6 is as old as half the age of the WWW. Methinks it is time to drop IE6. What says you sys admins?

IE7 was released on October 18, 2006 (after Microsoft reluctantly continued development of IE after it saw its market share quickly lose ground to Firefox). And we’ve just seen the release of IE8 on March 19, 2009.

Further Reading

• History of the Web (Wikipedia)
• History of IE (Wikipedia)
• IE6 Death March
• Put IE6 out of its misery – A list of Anti IE6 Websites.

The nation reported launching a satellite into orbit for the “soul” purpose of broadcasting patriotic songs from space. This, of course, to make North Korea’s rice grow faster and feed an increasingly angry population. All those who believe in the beneficial effect of revolutionary songs on rice growth hailed the launch as a great success and considered it money well spent. Those on the other side of the fence were hardly exhilarated and much less able to conceptualise its merits and expressed their dismay over the selection of songs that made it into orbit: they were looking for something rather more upbeat.

Dang–these be interesting times for sure…

Be Clear

Please don’t put us into a position where we have to decipher your intentions. When we have to do that, it takes up more of our time and the extra work involved will end up costing you more of your hard earned cash. Heck, it may even annoy us (and annoyed designers are far less productive than designers who are in good spirits).

Quality Content

As a site proprietor it is up to you to ensure that content is up to scratch. Well written content will please your visitors and generate more revenue for you as the owner of the site. On top of that, good designers put a lot of effort into properly crafted designs and prefer to see their hard work being matched by equally well crafted copy. At the very least, and at all times, run a spell checker on your copy before sending it out for publication.

Be Clear, Again

Actually write some copy. Don’t just give us vague hints: “uhm, this needs to say something down the lines of…” Consider us dumb machines: we need specific instructions (unless we actually have been contracted to be copy editors). If you don’t know how to write content, consider hiring someone who does.

Deliver Content In An Appropriate Format

Deliver content in an appropriate format: for instance, RTF (Rich Text File) or Microsoft Word. It is much harder for us to strip content from a PDF than convert a properly marked up RTF for example. You can also help us by highlighting the changed content.

Don’t Change Your Mind (Unless You Have To)

If updates have been scheduled to take place at a particular time don’t send us anything until then (unless our opinion is called for). We really don’t need the content until the actual updates are about to take place. Chances are you will change your mind in the meantime. Sending us multiple emails with conflicting requests for content updates will simply confuse us, and there is a chance we’ll miss some of your instructions. Of course you’ll want to send us revised copy when situations change, making clear that previous content has been scrapped.

Observe Email Etiquette

When you are sending us content via email, give emails a clear subject heading. That way, if we need to refer to your emails at a later stage we can easily find them again.

Also, refrain from giving updates about your sister’s friend’s cat. Business emails are for business, and generally should be limited to just that: business. It makes our job so much easier. While we may want to hear about the cat, we prefer you to give us an update in another email.

In Conclusion

While I’m sure I’ve left out some useful aspects of effective content delivery, these pointers will go a long way to helping us being more efficient and allow us to do what we do best: craft beautiful and useful sites.

Please remember that the more work you create for us, the more we have to bill you for.